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Tag: JavaScript

How many third-party scripts are loading on our web pages these days? How can we objectively measure the value of these (advertising, a/b testing, analytics, etc.) scripts—considering their impact on web performance, user experience, and business goals? We’ve learned to scrutinize content hierarchy, browser support, and page speed as part of the design and development process. Similarly, Trent will share recent experiences and explore ways to evaluate and discuss the inclusion of 3rd-party scripts.

The internet is, without metaphor, just a bunch of servers tied together with wires. Without servers, we’d have no way to share our creations with the world. Yet in a bit of a paradox, servers are less essential to our work than they’ve ever been. We can now do things on the front end that used to require a back end. When we do need a back end, our front end skills can be put to work, giving us some surprisingly powerful new abilities. Join Chris on a whirlwind tour of the tools, tech, and code that puts more power than ever into our front-end hands.

Design is problem solving. Each and every day, we are tasked with finding ways to reduce the friction our users experience on the Web. That means streamlining flows, reducing cognitive load, and writing more appropriate copy, but user experience goes far beyond the interface. Our users’ experiences begin with their first request to our servers. In this intensely practical session, Aaron will explore the ins and outs of page load performance by showing how he made the web site of the 10K Apart meet its own contest rules, by having a site that was functional and attractive even without JavaScript, and was less than ten kilobytes at initial load. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of the page load process as well as numerous ways you can improve the projects you are working on right now.

Do you ever get overwhelmed by the ever-changing nature of web design and development? Exhausting, isn’t it? How are you supposed to know which technologies and tools you should invest your time in? Will they stick around or will you just have to relearn everything in another few months? Join Jeremy as he takes a tour of the past, present, and future of working on the web. From the building blocks of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript through to frameworks and libraries right up to the latest and greatest Progressive Web Apps, this talk will examine our collective assumptions with a critical eye. By learning from the past, we can make sensible design decisions today to build the web of tomorrow.

A few weeks ago I spent some time breaking apart Sass files into smaller segments for a project at work, trying to go for a more modular approach for the CSS. Doing this in Sass is pretty simple. Pull out a section of styles into a new “partials” file, named something like _module.scss. Then in the main Sass file, import the module with @import "module";.

For quite a while I’ve wanted to be able to take a similar approach with JavaScript, breaking the main file into modules and using Sass-like imports to pull them all together. I knew this was supposed to be possible with ES6 modules, but every time I started doing the research, I was overwhelmed by new JavaScript techniques and tools (Babel? Webpack? Browserify? Rollup? RequireJS?). After my most recent attempt to find and understand a solution, I finally came up with something that works and I’m fairly happy with.

My team recently finished an overhaul of the navigation on our primary product, K-State Connect. Connect serves as a dashboard for Kansas State University, displaying various university services within “widgets”. The main goal of the navigation re-design was to add links directly to each of the widgets within the dashboard. The navigation was also in need of a better small screen experience.